**1. Introduction**

We humans are very practical creatures. We modify our surroundings to suit our needs—thus, we have been reshaping nature so that it would serve us best in a utilitarian and/or aesthetic sense. Throughout the history, a variety of gardens has been created—historical gardens (preserved or merely written about)—that today can give us a good insight into how resourceful humans were in a particular period of history or even provide us with ideas for our own living environment. Today, the term urban horticulture has become impossible to overlook—as stated by the United Nations: "today, 55% of the world's population lives in urban areas, a proportion that is expected to increase to 68% by 2050" [1]; therefore, it is even more appropriate to look back—just to see the future more clearly.

The definition of horticulture emphasizes the scientific and artistic way of managing plants with the goal of obtaining food and different materials or providing comfort and decoration. We can trace the origin of horticulture back to ancient civilizations—the Persians were great experts in this field. As Relf [2] nicely pointed out when interpreting the definition of horticulture as a synthesis of plants and humans, horticulture "encompasses PLANTS, including the multitude of products

(food, medicine, O2) essential for human survival; and PEOPLE, whose active and passive involvement with 'the garden' brings about benefits to them as individuals and to the communities and cultures they comprise." Humans and plants are therefore an essential part of horticulture. It was man's desire to take a particular plant from its natural environment and integrate it into the environment close to his home, which led to the emergence of designed gardens. And the idea of a designed garden could only be born when the people's goal was no longer survival and when the individual had free time and energy to beautify his or her surroundings [3].

Gardens have grown over time, as human knowledge has grown (in the fields of horticulture, mechanics, construction, etc.), and today historic gardens are a wonderful treasure trove of examples and ideas of how humans once incorporated nature into their living environment and how they can do that today or in the future. In this chapter, we will look at some examples from the history of garden design, and through these we will try to present some possibilities for future urban horticultural gardens.
